Our education system could get a boost by copying Finland

Yes it has, No it hasn't.

 

We could have taken that 1.7 Trillion dollars that we wasted on war in Iraq and Afghanistan and created an awesome educational system. You could pay 500,000 teachers 100,000 dollars a year with just 50 billion. Dang!!!

 

Furthermore, higher income parents are paying more for private tutoring services for their kids. That's another part of the reason for the disparity in performance.

We could have taken 10 billion dollars of that 1.7 trillion dollars we are spending for war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and created some great after school tutoring services for children.

 

The question is this:

Do we want to be a nation of war or a nation of education?

 

It's how both work. When my daughter was in a public middle school they could not teach her math. They tried to tell us she was learning disabled and needed to be put in a special needs class. We took her to a private after school tutoring school. They tested her and found she was perfectly normal and taught her math in the class after school. The particular company that runs the school expressly takes struggling students and TEACHES them, it's their job. In fact we then paid them to get her up top speed in English and Reading.

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But they take all they can get. They are a business and businesses don't survive by cherry picking customers. They survive because they can get the job done.

 

There are a multitude of territories and a multitude or products.

Not the ones where I live they want as many students as they can get so they can grow the school and then of course there are the supplemental learning centers that teach the children the public schools fail to teach.

 

Do you hold to the premise that physical characteristics are not genetic? The brain is just an organ of the body with physical characteristics which govern it's function. Just like your heart, just like your muscles.

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Why are they mutually exclusive. During WW2 we were both weren't we?

 

The question is with all the money we are already spending on the student for their public education why do we need to?

 

NO kidding. We already spend more than other nations. Paying the same teachers $200k a year to teach the same kids who have parents that don't care about their schooling would accomplish WHAT? You can't FORCE kids to learn. You can only hope they want to. With the breakdown in families, you have more kids who simply don't give a crud, because their parents don't care.

You can NOT throw money at the problem when its mostly a SOCIAL issue. My wife doesn't even want to re-enter the public school system now because she doesn't want to be judged by the grades some of her students may get. For example, if a student has a family melt down and crumbles during the year, the system will not account for the anomaly. You would figure something like that would be taken into account and omitted, but who wants to rely on the system to take care of it? The teacher could be punished due to something completely out of her control. Its insane!! And if you think it won't happen, think again. What teachers in their right minds would want to teach inner city kids and have their salary and bonuses based on kids who are destined to fail?

 

Best dodge EVER!

 

Noah's Ark. Literally every way in which that particular myth could be investigated has debunked it, from genetics to physics to thermodynamics to geology to geography to archeology to history. Oh, and then there's the enslavement of jews in egypt (never happened on the scale described), the temple of David (no evidence of its existence was ever found), the wandering for 40 years in the desert (a population that size wandering for 40 years in the desert would not survive), and essentially the entirety of the genesis cosmology that is just wrong, wrong, wrong.

I don't deny that. However, race, as described by racists, does not exist. The best they can come up with is correlations to the issue; they can bring up how people of certain (socially constructed) racial demographics perform worse on IQ tests and have lower standards of livings, but they have never once succeeded in demonstrating any genetic evidence behind it. Which they can't, for a number of reasons. First of all, the only racial markers one can present involve haplotypes, and those are widely spread. No racial population can even remotely be considered "pure", save for those who have been living in forced isolation for hundreds if not thousands of years. In fact, there's a whole lot of very complex genetic data to be had there; the important thing to note is that it shows a complete lack of basis, genetically, for the arbitrary separation of race we apply in society. And given that all people like Northwinds can point to is correlation, and that things like IQ, success in society, and societal advancement are incredibly multifaceted things with an incredibly large number of different causes... The research simply is not good enough. Correlation alone is not good enough. Period.

Just straight-up listing names with no context whatsoever is not a great debate tactic. Hell, I could do the same for AGW, the list would be several thousand names long, and you'd still ignore it.

 

They don't have to be mutually exclusive. We should be a nation of war when necessary, not a nation in a constant state of war.

 

That's a fair question. I would say that part of the problem is that they money we are spending, is not being spent wisely. Off the top of my head, I know we are spending too much money on standardized testing. The next thing is that we are not spending enough. We need lower student teacher ratios, we need to train teachers better, and we need to pay teachers more. Teaching is very, very, difficult work, when done properly.

 

I think it's a parenting thing, a language thing and a cultural thing.

 

But made 10X harder when your students don't want to learn. My wife's job was a pleasure some years when she had great students and a complete nightmare when she had troublemakers.

 

That's one reason why teachers need to be paid more.

 

Teachers like my wife with a Masters...sure, more pay might mean she'd go back into public school=) Otherwise, as she says, a few grand difference between public and private isn't worth the aggravation of dealing the crazy parents and administration again.

 

because that's what their job is!! wow. really?

 

That I will agree with completely.

 

parent involvement is key.

 

Originally Posted by Bluesguy
Do you hold to the premise that physical characteristics are not genetic? The brain is just an organ of the body with physical characteristics which govern it's function. Just like your heart, just like your muscles.

Yes it does with certain genetic features which are entirely predictable and cause physical characteristics which can determine the race of the person.

There are lots of influencing factors but like any other organ the brain is affected by the genes that produce it. So before you start claim what "they" say you perhaps should do a search of "is intelligence affected by genes" and read what "they" are discovering.

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And a competent effective teacher. You can overcome lousy parents but if your teacher is incompetent and unable to properly teach..................

 

Why would that suddenly make them better and more effective teachers, simply because they got more money?

 

Standardized testing doesn't cost a lot and all through my schooling in the 60's and 70's we had standardized testing. In fact my schools in Alabama used the California standardized test to compare and track student achievement.

We spend more than anyone else.

Again, I can pull out my classroom pictures from elementary school and count upwards of 38 students in my third grade class and we had double sessions and the teachers managed to teach us basic reading, writing, arithmetic, science and social studies.

Why are teach colleges and universities not doing that now with the highest tuition rates ever?

Why would a sudden increase in pay result in better performance and effectiveness from the same teachers?

Lots of things are difficult, teaching no more than most.

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Well tell that to our enemies and convince them and we won't have to be but until then yes we need to be a nation ready to defend itself against all those enemies and their attacks upon us and the threats they pose to us and the rest of the free world.

 

Précision must not be in the work force yet. Then he would know that in order to get a raise you have to prove you add value. In ignorant land, people think paying someone more makes them a better worker. How naive.

 

I hope you understand that for 30 solid years academia has built a trench then a mine field then concertina wire then another mine field then 25' chain link between genetics and intelligence. It's impenetrable. They redoubled the effort after 'The Bell Curve'. They have purely bulletproof excuses and you're not going to get anywhere. Nearly as much effort has gone into this as has been expended making gay=straight.

This agitprop is peddled across academia and it's drilled in. You will not escape perfect parroting of the party line in today's colleges.